


A Talk

by thefriendyouleftinthehallway



Category: Pushing Daisies
Genre: F/M, I', i'm sorry that none of these tags are canon rip, late night conversations aka my specialty genre, ned being a dramatic bitch, ned being defeatist, stress/binge eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:27:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28995975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefriendyouleftinthehallway/pseuds/thefriendyouleftinthehallway
Summary: Ned thinks Chuck is dead and he's a sad boy about it.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	A Talk

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually a really old work haha. It's been sitting in my drive for ages and I've had the most horrendous writer's block for a bunch, so I was surfing my Drive for ideas and I found this just… sitting there.

They’d taken her away in an ambulance; as if that would have helped her. As if there was some charade, the purpose of which being to convince the onlookers she wasn’t stone-cold dead. But it was pointless. He knew, and he was sure everyone else knew too. 

No lights. No sirens. The ambulance drove back at a leisurely pace in silence, and everyone knows what that means. 

The clock on the wall ticked over to 1 AM, and the kitchen was filled with the smell of cherry pie, and all he could think was Charles Charles dropping dead on his front lawn, and his alive-again mother dropping her pie onto the ground. The ceramic pie-pan shattering, splattering the kitchen tiles in cherry red. It smelled the same as the ones in the oven. 

He’d used his limited supply of fresh fruit; he couldn’t bear to bring anything back to life, not right now. Not after he couldn’t have done for her. His nervous fingers pressed crust flat, struggled not to drop baking beans as they shook, spooned cherry-red filling from copper saucepans. He pulled hot, lattice-lidded pies from the oven and replaced them with cold, raw counterparts as the clock ticked on. 

He jumped at the sound of a key sliding harshly into the lock, but as the back door opened he was faced with no-one but Olive. 

“What are you _doing_ here, Ned?” she asked. 

“I’m making pies. I’m a pie-maker. What are _you_ doing here?” he answered. 

“I don’t know,” she said, hurrying inside and closing the door behind her. “Oh Ned, we can’t sell all this.”

“I know,” he said with a sigh, plunging a nearby spoon into the freshest pie. 

“Look,” Olive started in that matter-of-fact tone of hers. (How was she so _together_? Ned wondered, eyes snapping up to her.) “I certainly didn’t plan on finding you here, but now that I have, I feel I have to ask: are you okay?” 

“Uh,” Ned said through a mouthful of cherry and crust. 

“Pretty stupid question when the answer’s always gonna be ‘no’, huh? But I have to ask anyway. It’s a social convention. …Do you wanna talk about it?” Olive levelled his gaze but Ned averted his eyes as he took a smaller, more tentative bite of the cherry pie. 

Once again his mind’s eye powerfully reflected the image of a too-still Charles Charles on his back on the lawn, pan slipping from his mother’s fingers, _crash_ , and a splash of red on the tiles. He swallowed. 

He steadied himself with a breath, but spoke too-quickly anyway. “Sometimes people do unselfish things for selfish reasons and then they do selfish things for selfish reasons, and sometimes people mean to stop but they can’t and they just freeze and it’s like a phantom-devil is wrapping itself around their hands and they can’t pull back and control themselves and someone ends up dead. And sometimes it’s my fault and I’m ‘people’ and Chuck is ‘someone’, and there was definitely something I could have done but I just didn’t and now--.” 

“Stop!” Olive cried. “Okay, I heard about half of that, but you’re saying it’s your fault? Don’t get me wrong, but didn’t she just _drop dead_?” 

“I touched her, Olive,” Ned said as he took another bite of pie. 

“You touched her? She _was_ your girlfriend, wasn’t she?” Ned went to speak, but Olive cut him off. “Now I know you have that freaky fear-of-intimacy thing, and god knows the backstory behind that-- I’m not even sure I _want_ to know, but touching isn’t going to _kill_ someone!” 

Ned put the spoon down hard. It _clack-_ ed into the pan with such force Olive flinched and had to do a double-take just to convince herself the pan hadn’t cracked. 

“There are things you don’t know about me, Olive,” said the pie-maker. 

Olive sighed and took a seat. “Well, Mister Mystery, I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re going on about, but why don’t you start at the beginning for me?”

“No!” he said quickly, but then amended himself. “I mean, there are things I can’t tell you, Olive!”

“Try me,” Olive said. 

Ned didn’t speak. He began working at eating the pie again, anxiety pouring from his expression as he did so. Olive stood and pulled the pan away from his reach, putting her hands on her hips. 

“If there’s something you need to say, you can say it!” she announced. 

“I can raise the dead,” Ned confessed. “My mother died and I killed Chuck’s father when I was 9. My father abandoned me and I’ve never had any friends and sometimes I wonder if I’m maybe just some sort of _thing_ , like a monster, not quite human, who has these weird powers and if maybe all I’ll ever do is drive everyone away.”

\---

  
As Olive opened her mouth to respond, Ned woke up with a start. A dream. It was a dream. No, a _nightmare_.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, a pretty stereotypical ending I'll admit. I love, love, LOVE getting comments from people! It would be super cool if you could do that…


End file.
